What is this "too geeky" you speak of?

Seal?

2012-05-19T09:48:32Z

Spent Friday afternoon at a cobbled-together meetup for local people who hang out on FFA. Four anons showed up, self included, and we all sat around in the coffee-and-bagels area of a bookstore and spent two hours talking about Anime Web Turnpike and our cosplay habits and Animorphs and how baffled we are by things like hockey RPF or coffeeshop AUs.

It was pretty awesome.

~~And more social interaction than I've managed to wrangle out of my IRL friends the past couple of weeks, but that's neither here or there.~~

On that note, a memey mini-roundup:

When the random people in Internet memes find out about their memedom, and other tales of accidental online fame.

"Meme, if you could only pick one, would you rather be in a fandom where people shipped nothing but slash while ignoring or occasionally bashing the female characters, or a fandom where people loved the female characters but wrote nothing but het and sometimes seemed to be kind of homophobic?"

Social justice poetry. Including a freeverse ode to FFA.

Fandom community college! What's your major? Your minor? The title of your thesis?

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BICP, Slavery, Hair, Shapeshifting, Money, and the Arkh Project

2012-05-15T04:56:55Z

Every time I hear more about the Arkh Project, I wish I had the ovaries to market But I'm A Cat Person as a triumph against oppression, to which every donation is a blow struck For Great Social Justice.

...the rest of this post is basically a tl;dr version of the above.

( Explanation and complaints about the Arkh Project )

( Further pontificating about BICP. )

Final note: FFA had a thread in which people talked about how they would redo Arkh if given the chance. Some respondents try to fix specific issues, in the gameplay or the worldbuilding; others describe a completely different game they would like someone to make instead. Either way, it's good reading.

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Erin Watches (Up to Eight Days Late) - Korra, Glee, House, Housewives

2012-05-13T23:18:59Z

It occurred to me recently that almost all the on-air shows I'm following are available free and legal online. So here's a roundup. With links!

Avatar: The Legend of Korra (discussion)

Airs on Saturdays; I get around to it by Monday.

( Continued under the cut )

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When Obama endorsed marriage equality I was all like

2012-05-10T20:09:10Z

1) keysmash keysmash grin grin grin

2) So the political calculation is that marriage support is now predicted to gain him votes rather than lose them! The depressing news out of North Carolina is a throwback. The national trend is -- forward!

(And no, I don't think he should've made the announcement before the Amendment One vote. It would have brought out the kneejerk bigot vote even more than it was already.)

3) Time to run off to make a week's worth of same-sex marriage Daily/Reports From Last Night :D

3) Ooh, look! It inspired a marriage equality bill to be introduced in Israel! START THEM DOMINOES FALLING.

4) This is a good GIF party.

5) ...aaaaand the tearing-down has already begun.

I'm not talking about the freakout from the right, mind you. I'm talking about the left.

I hate it when this happens. Any time we make progress, any time an initiative comes together to do some good, out comes the head-shaking and the eye-rolling about how it's not enough good. "How dare he only be the first sitting president to say he approves of same-sex marriage? Why can't he also declare it a constitutional right, and make it instantly legal in all fifty states, and personally send a bouquet of flowers to every couple who ties the knot as a result? And he should have done it three years ago!"

Look, lots of things should have happened. The last President should also have been in favor of same-sex marriage since the beginning of his term. For that matter, the last forty-three Presidents should have been. Do people think the folks appreciating Obama's announcement don't know that? Were they not even following the Amendment One vote? Do they not realize that LGBTQ rights are a struggle, that every step forward has been clawed out of the grip of bigots and fundamentalists and centuries of ignorance, that milestones like this can't be taken for granted?

In a perfect world Obama's support of same-sex marriage would be a nonstory, because the rest of the country would be so far ahead that it wouldn't even bear saying. But in the real world it isn't, and we aren't, and any progress toward our global acceptance is still cause for celebration.

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I definitely want fic of some of these animal mating tropes. Maybe even f/f.

2012-05-08T22:36:32Z

Animal courtship/mating behaviors that people wish would be adopted as fic tropes.

Fanfic titles that have been used too much.

Fandom neologisms. "SPAGhetti: the tangled mess you get back from a bad beta reader."

"I can't seem to get over the notion that if I don't write the definitive fic that addresses every possible issue in my f/f ship and converts non-shippers and has feminist themes, I'm doing it wrong. [...] Anybody have advice on how to get the critical inner voices to shut up for a bit?"

"So, anons, what was the first story you remember writing? (not necessarily fan fic)." ...I wonder if anyone can guess mine.

Issue fic you'd actually like to see, assuming you could get a talented writer to handle it in a compelling way.

Femslash discussion! Exploring how things shake out in fandoms with juggernaut f/f pairings, and/or femslash shipwars.

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High time for another roundup of silly geek stuff.

2012-05-01T00:10:43Z

Brackets for the 2012 iNternet diCkbAg chAmpionship tournament: Guy Who Thinks Anything With More Than Three Sentences Is Too Long To Read vs. Woman Who Thinks You Don’t Go To Heaven If You Don’t Spend 90% Of Your Waking Life Being Furiously Outraged At Something

Neil Gaiman talks online piracy, and how it's made his book sales go up. No surprise here (I'm one of the fans who discovered his writing when a friend lent me Good Omens, and have bought that and other works of his since).

Tons of red giants have rocky planets at the right distance to possibly have water. Tens of billions of habitable possibilities!

Grouchy scribes leaving comments in the margins in medieval manuscripts :D

Student writes his dissertation on comics (the degree is in interdisciplinary studies)...in comic form. Awesome. (I did the final papers for capstone classes in both my majors in comic format. Good teachers.)

The addictive powers of "stupid games". For me, it's Mafia Wars, plus a couple of Neopets games including Destruct-O-Match. (Though let it not be said that I don't appreciate my Tetris.)

A 92-year-old DVD bootlegger...for the troops! (The poor RIAA has no idea how to deal with this.)

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More on the AO3: Protest tagging

2012-04-24T17:27:28Z

***

ETA: It's been suggested that emailing tag concerns to Support would be a more productive course of action than the one described in this post. Do read the full discussion in the comments for more detail.

***

A while back, somebody on FFA said they would suggest flooding the AO3 with nonsense tags as a form of protest, except that it would probably just make things harder for the wranglers. I agree (speaking as both a wrangler and a user). But I think a more direct form of protest tagging might be useful.

So, non-wranglers who have works on the AO3, will you do me a favor?

Will you add "Please let me know if my tags are misplaced or have typos" to your freeform tags?

For context, letting wranglers change the categories of tags has been suggested in cases such as where someone's typed "Naruto" in the "Relationships" field. And letting wranglers inform users about incorrect tags was floated as a solution to tags like "Naruto. Sakura", where someone typed a period instead of a comma and the result is useless as a character tag.

And TPTB's response, from Emilie (the same one quoted a few times in the thread about the tag chat) on the wrangler mailing list:

"To my knowledge, no users have requested that wranglers change the categories of their tags, or for wranglers or the Archive to inform them when they may have tagged incorrectly. I agree that a subset of users would probably like these features. However, other than users who are also wranglers, no users have expressed an outright interest in them."

And "I agree that a general user survey would be really awesome and would like to implement one if possible. But until we have such results, I hesitate to ascribe wishes to users that there is no actual evidence for outside the pool of wranglers."

The general OTW survey is still in progress and hasn't been analyzed. There's no specific survey on tag preferences in the works. And the general comments from users in various journals either haven't been seen or just don't count.

But we haven't tried expressing this preference through tags themselves -- and the point on which TPTB are holding fast, no matter what other problems it causes, is "whatever tag a user puts in is important and meaningful."

(Which means that even if this doesn't get through to them, it will cause a circle of logic that will do interesting things to the fabric of the universe. Maybe it'll generate Higgs bosons! You never know! We could be doing physics a huge favor, here.)

Again, for anyone who feels this way, that's Please let me know if my tags are misplaced or have typos in your works' freeform tags. Tell your friends. Spread the word. Help me, DW (and FFA, once someone gets around to linking this); you're my only hope.

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Conflicting goals of the AO3's tag wrangling

2012-04-23T17:18:56Z

Just sent this email to the AO3's tag-wrangler mailing list, and figured it was long and detailed enough to post as an open letter of sorts. The list is moderated and I'm not going to copy out the whole conversation that led up to this point, but anyone who's been following complaints about tags in other venues can probably work out the basics.

This whole thing is heavily influenced by class discussions on the importance of human-driven metadata organization. When the semester's over, someone remind me to make a proper writeup of Information Science Student Thoughts about librarianship and controlled vocabularies vs. folksonomies, and what the AO3 is doing well vs. what it really need to do better.

***

People seem to keep focusing on the AO3's "you can use whatever tags you want" principle to the exclusion of all others. The problem is, that's not the only principle the archive is founded on. Another is "the tag wranglers will arrange things behind the scenes so that the tags you enter are workable." That's not only being advertised to users, it's a selling point for potential wranglers: "Have a problem with the way the tags are working in your fandom? Become a wrangler and you can fix them yourself!"

We can't live up to either selling point if the line given to active, engaged, ready-to-go wranglers is "well, actually, there is no framework for fixing that particular problem, and there never will be."

If we're going to talk about slippery slopes, we might as well say that it's an imposition for wranglers to syn tags at all. What if the person who tagged their work with "McShep" is using their own personal idiosyncratic tag system in which it means something very different from "Sheppard/McKay", and is going to be offended and upset that the two are linked together?

The fact is that there are very few users who make typos and misplaced tags deliberately, as forms of protest or clever personal schemes or whatever. Much more common is the user who makes typos and misplaces tags accidentally, and is assuming that part of the tag wranglers' job is to take care of that for them. Even people who know the system perfectly can still make mistakes -- just the other day I made two typos in a single tag, and that was when trying to create a canonical! And still more common than *that* is the user who's not writing, but reading, and wants to get all their McShep through one click -- as the AO3 has promised it will give them. This whole discussion has basically sidestepped the fact that the bulk of the archive use is by readers.

It's not just a niche interest of us picky wranglers to make tags usable. Nor should we have to feel apologetic and self-effacing for wanting to link "John/Rodney - Relationship" with "Rodney McKay/John Sheppard", any more than we feel like it's a horrible restriction on Tag Freedom to syn "McShep" with "Rodney McKay/John Sheppard". The niche interest here is the tiny subset of users that actively wants "tags that look like they should be usable, but in fact are not." And if the point of the AO3 were to cater to those users as much as possible, then we wouldn't have wranglers in the first place.

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Day of Silence is over, and it's back to linkspamming

2012-04-21T04:58:16Z

There's been a bunch of discussion on-meme about migratory slash fandom (that is, the group of people who jump from one Latest Big M/M Pairing to the next) recently, spawning a question about sedentary yuri fandom.

Trying to work out what differentiates "male fantasy" from "female fantasy" (er, as in sexual fantasy, not fairies-and-dragons fantasy).

Not seeing color: a combination of "how phrases change over time" and "the nuances of genuine racial ambiguity."

Speaking of racial confusion, an international question: what is it with Americans not referring to Middle Easterners as white?

Talk of triggers: common and uncommon, for trauma and for other mental health issues. Useful for the curious/confused about the terminology.

Speaking of mental health, an anon with depression issues wants to know: how to advance social justice without fostering an environment that's hostile to mental health?

FFA: den of homophobes? This one has some serious discussion on how people make the cognitive leap from "this community does not always follow an exact narrow script re: certain off-limits phrases" to "OMG they must be an *ism free-for-all." It also has a long tangent on the proper way to make tea. Because you gotta have priorities.

Bizarre reactions to AtLA: Legend of Korra, in the vein of "Korra acts too white." See, this is what happens when the Social Justice Required Script railroads you right out of reality.

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CISPA follows in SOPA/PIPA's footsteps

2012-04-14T05:52:50Z

Because the US government should totally be able to spy on anyone's email it feels like. Warrants, what are those?

Reddit summarizes. It's nasty.

HR 3523 status on GovTrack. If your representative is listed as one of the 106 cosponsors, look them up and contact them. If they're not, and even if you're not in the US, have an international petition to sign.

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Your on-point video for the day

2012-04-08T18:59:48Z

"You want to have the boy crucified and murdered just for dramatic effect?"

"No! Please, that's sick! Not just for dramatic effect! Do you have any idea how many chocolate bunnies this thing is gonna sell?"

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Copyright/copyleft: A Fair(y) Use Tale

2012-04-06T03:34:28Z

Yesterday in archives management we did our first session on copyright. This video was an integral part of the class :D

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Medical, political, historical

2012-04-03T20:08:13Z

Presidential support for Stephen Colbert is variable in meaning at the best of times, but when 66% of surveyed voters say they would be less likely to vote for Stephanie Colbert, that's not hard to interpret. Either people think gender is a significant factor in competence at being a fake candidate, or they think the question is low-stakes enough that they don't have to make the effort to hide their blatant sexism.

Dementia among aging criminals: in lieu of enough [funding for] outside professionals, their fellow prisoners are being brought into the job.

Historical treatments for depression, starting with the ancient Greeks.

Dress like a doctor, make yourself smarter: the way our psychology is affected by what we wear.

"43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they 'have not used a government program.'"

Recent graduates in career limbo. Also, fine-tuning the keywords on your resume, or the exhausting grind of nothing to be done and the urgent pressure to do it. Grad school has me out of this stage...for now, at least.

Breakdown of the current employment status of one class of 2011.

Drug abuse down by half in Portugal over the past ten years. Note that ten years ago is when Portugal decided to decriminalize...everything.

A four-year-old boy comes out as straight to his gay parents. Adoooorable.

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Aw yeah. Shake those claws.

2012-03-29T04:11:11Z

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And this is a palate-cleansing post of geeky stuff.

2012-03-24T21:58:07Z

The words used to identify ASCII characters, from the familiar to the obscure.

Indian man who wandered away from his family at age 5 finds them again...via Google Maps.

A column written on the death of William Hanna (as in Hanna-Barbera), as written by the characters he was known for.

Some thoughts on small talk from people who aren't good at it.

House of 1000 Manga reviews Hellsing (the manga, with nods to the animated versions). With appreciation for the style, ridiculousness, and glory all in turn.

What's the gospel in seven words? The limit forces lots of responses to be perfectly eloquent...and perfectly snarky. A favorite: "Fine, you can use mixed fabrics again." (Putting it another way: "Having a kid does change everyone, apparently.") Vonnegut's version: "Goddammit, babies, you've got to be kind." The Bill & Ted version: "Be excellent unto each other. Party on." One commenter's daughter adds: "For God's sake, don't be a dick."

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This is another angry uterus-related post.

2012-03-24T21:52:13Z

Doonesbury pulls no punches in covering the latest abortion-restricting amendments.

A physician expresses some anonymous outrage, and urges zir fellows to act as the last line of defense against patients.

Kansas wants to levy a sales tax on abortions. No exceptions. After all, why raise taxes on the 1% when you can tax rape survivors whose pregnancies might kill them?

They also, along with Arizona, are pushing for doctors to be allowed to hide medical information from their pregnant patients, and be shielded from malpractice lawsuits if the women have health complications as a result. Although, take heart: they can be sued if the woman dies!

On the flip side, there are also laws compelling doctors to compel unnecessary information into their pregnant patients' heads. This author, whose child if it survived to term would have been brain-damaged and in constant pain, makes what must have been the hardest decision of her life, and every doctor she works with apologizes for being legally compelled to hurt her before they can help her.

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Discussion threads on fandom & sex & writing

2012-03-21T18:27:16Z

EFW: Pony Edition, which is really only funny if you meme, but if you meme, is very funny. A cranky edition follows. FFA fanmix! - someone ought to make this, for real.

Top/bottom preferences in femslash -- the analyses vary between physical and emotional taking-the-lead for a whole bunch of f/f OTPs.

Fanfic versus original fic: stylistic choices, the flow of tropes, what pings people as "you used to write fanfic, didn't you?" in profic.

Refractory periods and orgasm anatomy in general: the less-talked-about female-bodied side of things. Kinda related, a possibly-asexual anon wants to know: what does sexual attraction itself feel like?

Insecure anon wonders if fandom is perhaps a negative influence in their life; levelheaded and objective responses.

How people get into RPF: different paths for different fandoms.

Series plots according to fanfic summaries.

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Writing AUs: Why They Sometimes Suck, And How To Make Them Not

2012-03-18T04:23:49Z

For month_of_meta, some thoughts on writing AUs. It's a recurring favorite topic when talking RPF, and a hot one in general right now, given that a Twilight AU with the serial numbers filed off is currently a New York Times bestseller.

So here's the thing. One of the strengths of fanfiction in general is its ability to get more strength out of less description by leveraging the whole emotional weight of canon. (I've put some recs for stories that do this well -- various lengths, multifandom -- at the end of the post.) And one of the criticisms people make of AUs is that they don't, or can't, do this. A truism that comes up a lot in discussions of RPF is that RPF AUs are basically original fiction already, with the fandom's favorite actors cast in the lead roles.

It's not a completely unfair judgment, but I think it's a mistake to draw the dividing line along "RPF vs. standard fanfiction" rather than "bland characters vs. unique characters."

Or, better yet: "bad characterization versus good characterization," since even a well-done canon can be badly handled by fic writers. Let me dive into ff.net's Sailor Moon section to read you some of the AU summaries on the first few pages of Usagi/Mamoru (Serena/Darien for writers going with the NA dub names) fic...

( Cutting the rest of this, because it gets long. )

( Fic recs )

Not an exhaustive list by any means. Share your own AU recs! Or talk about the thought process that's gone into AUs you've written. Or...I don't know, cast the pizza shop AU of your favorite fandom. ~~Or become suddenly inspired to write epic Olivia/Kristen AUs. (Please?)~~

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It's official! (Website update)

2012-03-15T07:13:12Z

The main page of erinptah.com now sends you directly to this blog. Slick new layout and all.

Having added the "Favorites" link list (it sounded nicer than "Miscellaneous"), I'm a little tempted to go wild and LINK ALL THE THINGS. After starting with projects I'd contributed to, I threw in a few sites I've paid special attention to along the way -- Day of Silence, Kiva, and LibriVox. But if you were to expand that to "things around the Internet that I read and happen to like"...

...Screw it, if I'm going to go pick up links to share as examples, I may as well pick up links and put them on a list.

[20 links later]

I retroactively apologize to every blog I ever rolled my eyes at for having a ridiculously long blogroll. (Although the next step will probably be shuffling them off to their own page.)

The main thing still to fix up is the About page. I don't suppose anyone has requests for it? Past history suggests the text will get written to semi-completeness and then left unchanged for years, so if there are any burning questions you've always wanted answered, now's the time to get them in.

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This is a post about civil rights. Mostly uterus-related ones.

2012-03-06T02:37:06Z

Image from a school for black civil rights activists, 1960: young woman being trained to not react to smoke blown in her face. Hardcore.

Profiles of seven queer African-Americans, from the dawn of the Civil Rights movement to the present day.

Don't like the Mormon practice of posthumously baptizing people (regardless of religion, up to and including Jewish Holocaust victims) as Mormons? This handy website automates the process of posthumously conferring homosexuality on dead Mormons.

History and context for pre-Roe abortion, including both the author's personal experience in the '60s and a fascinating look at how the battle lines in the US have shifted. In particluar, how the prevailing mindset used to be "before it starts kicking, it's none of the public's business."

And the history of how "life begins at conception" ended up in evangelical dogma. Check out how different the opinions of conservative bible-literalist Christians looked as recently as 1979.

From pro-life teenie to scared young adult in a crisis: "And while I knew there were hardliners who would disagree with her, including the woman who showed me fetuses and told me horror stories in church, those people weren't there for me when I was scared and lonely and embarrassed. Planned Parenthood was, in the form of the woman who stayed at her job an hour later than necessary to talk a scared young woman through an incredibly safe medical experience."

Speaking of horror stories and scare pictures: Anatomy of an unsafe abortion (warning for gore). The reason pro-choice people don't carry gory posters around at pro-blastocyte-rights events isn't for lack of images to choose from.

Want another? Look up the truly misleadingly named ovarian chocolate cyst (warning for ick). Of the millions of US women 15-44 who use birth control, 58% have reasons unrelated to family planning -- including the prevention of such cysts.

Fifteen-year-old faces life in prison for a miscarriage. One of the real, practical results of trying to sneak up on chipping away at abortion rights slantwise.

Rick Santorum's proposed anti-amniocentesis rules would have killed this author's daughter. Because clearly his self-important theory-based scaremongering is more important than actual science saving the lives of actual people. (There's a theme developing here.)

I do love the Onion: Voters Slowly Realizing Santorum Believes Every Deranged Word That Comes Out Of His Mouth.

In an effort to close on a non-sucky note: Memories of growing up with Christian contemporary music, and then discovering Nirvana.

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Seven Questions: writing processes, favorite comics, cat stories, Doctor Who

2012-03-03T20:16:28Z

Questions from sarcasticsra, who was doing a meme about them...

1) Is there a different frame of mind you need to be in to work on a comic as opposed to writing a fic?

Definitely. There's a rhythm to comics; you need a punch line, or, if it's a serious sequence, some kind of dramatic/cliffhanger-y moment -- something to pull the reader on to the next page. It's especially pronounced in a three- or four-panel strip. Fics have an overall shape in terms of Freytag's pyramid, and in long fics it also applies to individual chapters, but the pattern doesn't get as fine-grained as that constant, strip-by-strip heartbeat.

( Continued under the cut. )

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MD FTW

2012-03-02T03:17:33Z

Way to go, Maryland!

Funny how getting to meet some same-sex couples can leave you with the impression that our love is real love, and our rights should be real rights =)

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Oh, you pretty things

2012-02-23T22:18:43Z

Catvertising! This is clearly a Viridian Dynamics project, y/y?

Perspective. The universe, to scale.

Awesome abandoned monuments. They look like sci-fi set pieces, like crashed spacecraft, or the ruins of cultures too ancient to be related to anything we know...but they were built in the '60s and '70s.

Chocolate planets! I'd say I want some, but they look too good to eat.

The world's tallest treehouse! Ten stories high! Amazing.

Look, it's a baby Internet: what some of the world's biggest websites looked like on launch date. Google is surprisingly similar. Amazon is surprisingly ridiculous.

Mysterious, anonymous, and AWESOME paper sculptures appearing randomly in libraries around Scotland. Less anonymous, no less amazing: landscapes sculpted from carved-out books.

Multilingual collection of words that have no translation to English. Or so they claim. Forelsket is described in poly circles as NRE; pochemuchka has an equivalent in elephant's child; pena ajena is embarrassment squick; taarradhin sounds a lot like a win-win situation; guanxi has the definition that many English-speakers have affixed to "karma". And certain people would recognize backpfeifengesicht if you said "BBC's Sherlock" (although using German for this kind of list is cheating anyway, as all their nouns are compound anyway).

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Favorite lines and fannish histories

2012-02-18T17:44:50Z

Lesbian Megathread! A massive list of every fandom and canon people could think of offhand "that has: 1. Canon lesbians! and/or 2. Notable femslashy subtext, and/or 3. A fandom with a lot of femslash!"

First fanfic you ever wrote? Adorable. Later, stories of how people found their way into fandom/LJ.

Favorite lines, from the inspirational to the awesomely silly.

From video game fandoms: how to write fic with protagonists who are silent in canon.

Favorite kinds of AUs, and best and worst fandoms for creating them. The latter thread makes a nice observation about "fandoms where it's fun to write the characters in AUs" and "fandoms where it's fun to write the setting as a base AU for other characters."

Your fandom's lovable quirks. Tales of ESL fandoms.

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waves rainbow pennants

2012-02-13T23:47:50Z

Yay New Jersey!

ETA: Yay Washington state!

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